FIFTEEN MINUTES AS PHILOSOPHERS
The classroom door opens. Amir and Sylvie enter, a bit intimidated. They take a few steps, look at the walls, the board, the tables…
AMIR (murmurs)
Well, here I am… here we are back in our old classroom…Here where you taught your philosophy class…
SYLVIE (she interrupts him)
Was it really this room? Are you sure?
AMIR (looks around then shrugs his shoulders)
This one or another one…They all look the same, after all.
SYLVIE (she paces back and forth while Amir takes a seat and looks at her)
No, not really. Personally, I liked the rooms where they taught geography. The colored maps on the wall, the globe on the desk… what a dream. Although…Today’s maps don’t have any more white zones, unexplored territories or places where no one has ever set foot. In antiquity, the maps of Africa had only one indication: hic sunt leones. (She laughs.) “Here, there are lions!” But there are no more lions in Morocco, unfortunately. The last was captured in 1912… (She turns back toward Amir.) Why are you smiling?
AMIR (still smiling)
Because here you are once again starting on a long monologue… Digressions…Like before. Incidentally, we used to call you “the overflowing river” more often than “Madame Rivière, the philosophy professor.”
SYLVIE
“Mademoiselle,” please. I wasn’t married.
AMIR
Yes, but we called you Madame Rivière. (He makes an offhand gesture with his hand.) Madame, mademoiselle…We didn’t make the distinction.
SYLVIE (daydreaming)
Believe me, there is one. (She laughs nervously.) I felt it happen… Ahem! (She pulls herself together.) I say, “the overflowing river,” that wasn’t very nice. I had just arrived from France, I was barely twenty-five years old, I wanted to teach you everything. You seemed like fledglings eagerly awaiting their beak…Well, not everyone… There were of course the loafs in the back…who seemed less interested in Kant or Bergson than in… (she crosses her arms across her chest.) in, what’s the word? My tits? (She shakes her head.) The loafs…I wonder what’s become of them. Sociologists, probably. (She laughs.) But the others, I wanted to teach them everything. Thus my mo-no-logues, my di-gres-sions, as you say. And philosophy…well, philosophy, it encompasses everything, everything is a part of it! (Finger raised, sententiously) Even mathematics is just a branch of philosophy!
AMIR (mockingly)
Mathematics? You know how to solve a differential equation?
SYLVIE
A what?
AMIR
A diff-fer-en-tial e-qua-tion.
SYLVIE
Ha, ha, very funny. Unfortunately, the branches of knowledge split very early on and we can’t learn everything. I studied philosophy in the strictest sense of the term.
AMIR (coldly)
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
SYLVIE (approaching Amir)
So it’s in a classroom like this one that it happened…What you call your “score to settle.” Is that it, the expression you used yesterday?
AMIR
Yes. How to explain? I don’t know where to begin. The problem…
SYLVIE (interrupting him)
Why do you call it a “problem”?
AMIR
It doesn’t matter what we call it! “Problem,” “question,” “concern,” as we’ve been saying for the past few years. (Snickering) “Souci!” It’s the name of a flower…there’s nothing more insipid than that! As if we’re afraid of words. Who decided the word “problem” was too scary and we shouldn’t use it anymore? Probably some marketing hotshot…
SYLVIE
Probably one of the dunces from the old days…
TOGETHER:
…now a sociologist! (She laughs. He snickers.)
AMIR
Anyway, the problem…Well, you’re the one who posed it.
SYLVIE
Me?
AMIR
Yes. Starting with your first philosophy class. That famous Pascal text…I still remember. “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason…The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
Sylvie
Yes, it’s the most famous passage of Pensées. Beautiful, isn’t it?
Amir (starts)
Beautiful? Beautiful?? Sure, but I was sixteen years old! It was the first time that…that I studied philosophy, that I came into contact with “thought.” (He pronounces the word in a grandiloquent tone.) For me, what you said, it wasn’t beautiful, it was the truth…A whole new continent opened up, as if…as if my eyes were opened up, too…
SYLVIE
You’re exaggerating!
AMIR (more and more vehement)
Not at all! It was your job, to teach philosophy. You came to deliver your class and you left. But for me, it was…it was something else. Thought…Doubt! The anxiety that set in! “The short duration of my life in the infinite immensity of spaces…” I barely had the time to digest that and — wham! — Nietzsche was thrust upon me!
SYLVIE (mocking)
Alright then! Nietzsche was thrust upon you! Did it hurt?
AMIR (shrugs his shoulders)
Go ahead, make fun of me…
SYLVIE (conciliatory)
I’m sorry…But which Nietzsche text are you talking about? I don’t remember talking about Nietzsche.
AMIR
You did! That business of eternal recurrence!
SYLVIE
Oh right!
AMIR (agitated)
It went something like: “One day, or one night, a demon will wake you and say to you: this life, as you now live it and have lived it, well, you will have to live it once more, in all its details, even the most minuscule; every joy, every sorrow…every thought and every sigh…in the same succession, from beginning to end. The same inescapable sequence! And then you will have to start over, again and again…Indefinitely!” Such anxiety! That day, I couldn’t eat anything. I didn’t sleep at all that night!
SYLVIE (astonished)
I say! If I had known…You were a very sensitive adolescent, very suggestible.